- My dear friend Jack Shamama brings us the above iPhone pic – a classic Folsom Street Fair moment in time (San Francisco, Sunday September 23).
Best Folsom 2012 moment … (Jack Shamama | Twitter)
- Turkish rescue workers retrieved an inflatable sex doll from the Black Sea after police were notified by panicked residents who mistook it for a woman’s body floating offshore, Milliyet newspaper reported on Sunday.
Turkish divers ‘rescue’ blow-up sex doll from sea (Reuters)
- At The Rumpus, Zoe Ruiz writes a melodic essay about meeting her first and only porn star crush, Kink’s Princess Donna.
Donna (The Rumpus)
- Em and Lo explore the widely held notion that open relationships or being poly might be a “cure” for jealously. Spoiler alert: no.
Can Open Relationships Cure Jealousy? (Em & Lo)
- So many sex subcultures get to do the biggest ‘I told you so’ over this one: New research finds that comfort with sexual communication is directly linked to sexual satisfaction. According to the study, people who are more comfortable talking about sex are apparently happier with their erotic lives.
Talking About Sex During Sex Is Good for Sex (LiveScience)
- The fact that Burning Man has not been doing rape kits before shipping sexual assault victims off the playa is so fucking inexcusable, I can’t even dig into the rest of this post, which is (IMO) one horrifying admission after another.
Sexual Assault in Black Rock City (Burning [Man] Blog)
- One of the sex educators I respect above nearly all others is Dr. Cory Silverberg, and in this post he describes how he sees and defines gender in fascinating details. I think it’s the start of a roadmap for our present, and their future.
What Do I Call Gender? (About: Sex)
- Texas police officers – well, Austin – rock ‘it gets better’ so hard in this new video.
Gay Texas Police Officers Say “It Gets Better” (Buzzfeed)
- National Geographic’s “Taboo” series has mostly been poorly researched, sex-negative, sensationalistic crap. But this installment about female bodybuilders paying rent by doing fetish work is interesting.
Muscle Worship (National Geographic Channel)
- There’s most certainly more to this story: an English subject worksheet for third-year students at an Islamic school in East Java contained the [clothed] image of the porn star Maria Ozawa, popularly known as Miyabi.
Japanese porn star in workbook angers Indonesian parents (Times LIVE)
- Bosnia’s electoral commission has kicked out an independent candidate from the race for the mayor of the country’s fourth-largest city for using online porn to attract voters: Mirad Hadziahmetovic was banned from participating in the race for mayor of Zenica in the October elections for uploading pornographic video clips to his official campaign site.
Bosnian candidate banned from elections over porn (Boston.com)
- Last week’s CatalystCon, a new conference on human sexuality, assembled a variety of perspectives around sex and porn, from sex educator Charlie Glickman’s take on modern masculinity to “professional naked woman” Jolene Parton’s views on fat women in porn.
Porn and the media: How the pornography industry wants to be covered (Slate)
- File under: wait and see. Sasha Grey‘s fiction debut is an erotic novel titled The Juliette Society, has distribution deals and is being described as “Fight Club set in a highly sexualized world with an assertive female protagonist.”
Sasha Grey Sells Erotic Novel — Ex-Porn Star Pens ‘Juliette Society’ (Deadline)
- We already knew Paris Hilton was a bigot, mostly towards Blacks and Asians, but now we get to add gays to that list. A taxi driver recorded a conversation between Paris and her gay model friend who was explaining the Grindr app. This eventually led to Paris Hilton shouting that most gays have AIDS.
Paris Hilton Says Most Gays Who Have Sex Randomly Probably Have AIDS (The Blemish)
- I love this blog; I’m sure you can see why… News cat gifs vs. Twitter sexspambots.
When your hashtag gets hijacked by sexspambots (News Cat Gifs!)
What Ducky said. The article in question really ran with a weird angle about the rape kits. It is unlikely that the staff of BM have the training or equipment to properly store and administer a rape kit. I would not be surprised if one could find women’s shelters that were in the same situation. And as for “driving women off the playa”, that’s simply a matter of their staff *taking* victims to a facility where such an exam can be done, and offering to return them to BM if they so choose. Nothing sinister there.
Not saying BM is perfect or that more can’t be done in that community to prevent sexual assault. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if they have the same problems with thinking they’re above such petty concerns that the BDSM community fell pray to. But the lack of rape kits really isn’t the issue.
As a Sexual Assault & Violence Intervention Counselor I can tell you… Burning Man medics are spot on here. For them to perform an evidence collection kit on the playa would potentially open a survivor up to more trauma and contaminate evidence. Evidence collection kits must follow a strict protocol to ensure they will hold up in court if a survivor decides to prosecute. And it always helps if a survivor has an advocate by their side to help them decide how they want their body cared for and if they even want to have a kit done. Burning Man might actually do well by having an advocate on hand. or perhaps they already do.
“The fact that Burning Man has not been doing rape kits before shipping sexual assault victims off the playa is so fucking inexcusable” Your expectations are clearly out of whack then. Burning Man is simply an event, the organizers just regular folks. They stated that they are not trained to administer a rape kit. Who on earth would expect them to be trained in this?
If you went to a concert would you expect the organizers/band/promoters to be able to administer a rape kit? No that is the job of law enforcement, they gather evidence and investigate crimes. I can’t see a single thing in the article that is bad, in fact they seem to go above and beyond their duty as event organizers.
Good for you Burning Man.
The Burning Man thing – I’m confused. They say that they help victims to reach appropriate medical facilities – ones that can administer rape kits that will stand up in court. And that they assign mental health specialists and sexual assault specialists to help the victims.
I don’t know a lot about the appropriate level of care in these circumstances, but reading that blog post I didn’t get the feeling of “one horrifying admission after another”. Would you be able to go into a bit more detail on this story?
Hmm, Paris Hilton is a nitwit, I think we agree on that. But I’m not sure that I can add “bigot against gays” to the list based on those comments. As I understand it, there is a distressingly high prevalence of HIV infection among gay men. And I have to suspect that men hooking up with strangers using Grinder probably have an even higher risk than less promiscuous men. So while her choice of words was very immature and insensitive, I’m not sure that she was behaving like a bigot. If one of my gay friends said he wanted to hook up with random people using Grinder, I’d probably express concern about that being a somewhat risky behavior and urge him to use protection.
Hey, not sure you read that burning man article correctly but it said physicians can’t actually perform the sexual assault forensic exams in the desert.